Transaction and Standard Service Emails – the Essentials

If you’ve ever bought something online, or signed up for an email newsletter, you will have received a fair few standardised service emails. These are emails that give a customer all the basic information about their transactions, subscription confirmations and order confirmations. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses take these transactional emails for granted and don’t consider their power in building a better relationship with their customers.

Why Are Transaction or Service Emails Important?

Whatever you do, don’t confuse these transactional emails with marketing emails because they are two different things. Marketing emails focus primarily on marketing products or services to your customers and/or leads. Transactional emails are your way of defining the customer experience, and making it a positive one. So why are they different?

First off, transactional emails are opened more frequently than marketing emails because transactional emails relate to the customer’s recent activities like signing up to a newsletter or opening a new account. Whenever a customer makes a purchase or even performs a simple action on your website, they want to get some sense that they can trust your business and your brand, and to know that whatever they did, or whatever they bought, is actually confirmed on your end too!

So, now that that’s cleared up, let’s take a look at some of the common kinds of transaction email.

Account or Subscription Confirmations

When you go to a website and sign up for a new account, you’ll get an account confirmation email sent to your inbox. This confirmation may have your username and password information in it as well, depending on how secure the website wants to be with this information.

If your website allows people to sign up for new accounts,then you should always, always have the same type of account confirmations sent to them as well. These confirmations are just to assure new account holders that their information has been received and their accounts have been successfully created. That way, they don’t have to wait and wonder whether they truly have a new account or not.

The same concept applies to people who sign up for your newsletter subscription. If they type in their email and click “Subscribe,” they need a confirmation which assures them that they are actually subscribed. Think of how you would feel if after you signed up for an account on a website, it took 24 hours for them to confirm that you had. You’d feel like you’d done it wrong! On the plus side, you can use these emails to very quickly ‘plug’ something about your site, like an existing blog post that they might be interested in before they get their first newsletter!

Order Confirmations

Order confirmations are the most important transactional emails you can send out because they concern an order that a customer has already placed. If they have paid money for a product or service and have not received any communication back from you, they might start assuming the worst at this point, and wonder whether the order went through.

Since customers cannot see who they are dealing with, you need to take the proper steps to ensure that they are contacted after each order they place. An order confirmation should contain information about the names of the products or services they purchased, how much they paid, the date they paid, and the estimated delivery date. The easiest way to make sure that each and every customer gets one of these emails is with automatic CRM email templates.

A typical confirmation email provides basic information that you probably take for granted when you place an order, but would be notable by its absence! Say for example that you bought a pair of socks on Amazon. You would expect your confirmation email to detail…

The name/description of what you ordered

An image of the product

An estimated delivery date

The logo of your brand/e-commerce site

But it’s important to get these things right. Imagine if…

The wrong product name was listed

The image was different to what you thought you ordered

The delivery date was further away or sooner than you expected

The logo (and images generally) were of a poor quality

How would you feel? Well, you’d probably avoid buying from that seller again, that’s for sure. That’s just a snapshot of how important order confirmations and all the other kinds of transaction/service emails are.

Follow-up to Order

It isn’t enough to just send out an order confirmation. You need to keep the customers in the loop about what is going on with the order status. This means you should have confirmations sent to them when their shipment is being prepared, when it is sent out, and after it is delivered. You should email the tracking information to the customer after the order is sent out, so they can have the power to see where the package is too.

The more information you provide to the customer about their order, the happier they will feel. Not to mention that you can use them as an opportunity to link customers to similar products on your site, and earn some subsequent sales.

Password Reset Confirmations

Account holders on your website may not always remember their passwords. They will need the assistance of a Password Reset link to allow them to reset their password, so they can create a new one. Once they type in their password on the Password Reset page, a confirmation will be sent to their email address. This confirmation will either contain a random new password for them or a link to a secured web page where the user can create their own new password.

The last thing you’ll want to happen is to have all these account holders sending emails to you asking for you to reset their passwords for them. This will take up a lot of your time and energy, which is especially frustrating if you were only just getting round to replying- remember, sending transaction and service emails quickly is the most important thing. Having an automated system with accurate email addresses will stop that from happening.

Transactional Email Solutions

Transactional emails will be almost completely automated after you set them up, but you still need to manage them periodically. Whenever someone performs a certain action, you need to set it up so that an automated email is sent to that person straight away with simple CRM email templates. But that’s not the end of the story. As your business grows and adapts, you’ll want to review your service emails to make sure that they encourage clicks and portray your business in a positive light: A/B testing is a great way to do just that.

Templates like these are simple: they don’t have to be too complicated, or exceptionally rich in content. Just by using automatic CRM templates your business looks competent, promotes repeat sales, and keeps the customer informed of everything they need to know – what’s not to love about that?